Washminster

Saturday, 19 October 2013

Tom Foley, former Speaker of the House of Representatives has passed away. He had previously been the Majority Whip - and for my study on whips I read much about him - and the key roles he played in the House during the period my study covered. He co-wrote with his former press secretary "Honor in the House" - a book I used extensively for the whips study & now being used into my research into the 94th Congress. It is an excellent book, and I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone wishing to understand the House of Representatives or the political history of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The New York Times Obituary said -

"Thomas S. Foley, a courtly congressman from Washington State who as speaker of the House sought to still the chamber’s rising tide of partisan combat before it swept the Democratic majority, and Mr. Foley himself, out of office in 1994, died on Friday at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 84.

Paul Hosefros/The New York Times

His wife, Heather, said the cause was complications of strokes. He had a stroke last December, was hospitalized with pneumonia in May and had been under hospice care at his home virtually since then, she said.

In a statement, President Obama called Mr. Foley “a legend of the United States Congress” whose “straightforward approach helped him find common ground with members of both parties.”

Mr. Foley — well read, impeccably dressed and quite tall (he stood 6-foot-4) — had been the House majority leader when he took the speaker’s chair on June 6, 1989. His rise came in the wake of a bitter, though successful, fight led by Representative Newt Gingrich, a Republican from Georgia, to oust Speaker Jim Wright, a Democrat from Texas, over allegations of ethics violations; one was that he had improperly accepted gifts from a Fort Worth developer. Mr. Wright resigned before an ethics inquiry was completed.

Mr. Foley immediately appealed to “our friends on the Republican side to come together and put away bitterness and division and hostility.” He promised to treat “each and every member” fairly, regardless of party, and by most estimations he lived up to that promise to a degree unmatched by his successors. For a time, he succeeded in making the House a more civil place, winning praise from many Republicans for his fairness.

But by 1994, Republicans had hardened, painting the Democratic-controlled House as out of touch and corrupt.

Their strategy worked. That year, Republicans won their first majority in the House in 40 years, and Mr. Foley became the first speaker since the Civil War to be defeated for re-election in his own district. (Speaker Galusha A. Grow of Pennsylvania lost his seat in 1862.)

Mr. Foley had gotten a taste of that partisanship a few days before becoming speaker, when the Republican National Committee and an aide to Mr. Gingrich sought to portray him as homosexual. The committee put out a memo labeled “Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet,” equating his voting record with that of Barney Frank, the gay representative from Massachusetts, and the Gingrich aide urged reporters to investigate Mr. Foley’s sexuality. Mr. Foley denied he was gay.

President George Bush said he was “disgusted at the memo,” but he also said he believed the R.N.C. chairman, Lee Atwater, who had been Mr. Bush’s presidential campaign strategist, when Mr. Atwater said he did not know where the memo had originated. Because of Mr. Atwater’s own reputation for attack-dog politics, the president’s belief was not widely shared.

Mr. Foley’s five and a half years as speaker were marked by a successful effort to force President Bush to accept tax increases as part of a 1990 deficit-reduction deal, and by unsuccessful opposition to the president’s plans to invade Iraq in 1991.

When Mr. Bush was succeeded by Bill Clinton, a Democrat, Mr. Foley played a central role in winning passage of Mr. Clinton’s 1993 budget plan, which also included tax increases. The measure passed the House, 218 to 216, without a single Republican vote.

And despite a long history of opposing any gun control measures, Mr. Foley helped win House passage of a 1994 ban on assault weapons, which played a major role in the Republican victory that fall. He had been shaken when a troubled Air Force enlisted man went on a shooting rampage at Fairchild Air Force Base outside Spokane, Wash., killing 5 people and wounding 22.

He also bucked a majority of House Democrats in supporting Mr. Clinton’s successful effort to win ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

But he did not cite any of those measures in reflecting on his record in his last news conference, on Nov. 19, 1994.

“If I had one compelling concern in the time that I have been speaker, but previous to that as well,” he said, “it is that we not idly tamper with the Constitution of the United States.”

He had been a fierce opponent of proposed constitutional amendments that would have required a balanced federal budget, term limits for members of Congress and a ban on flag burning, all championed by Republicans. Of the flag-burning measure, he said, “If it is not conservative to protect the Bill of Rights, then I don’t know what conservatism is today.”

Despite sharp differences on issues, he got along better with members of the other party than any of the speakers who followed him. In that final news conference, asked to offer advice to the next speaker, Mr. Gingrich, he urged him to remember, “You are the speaker of the whole House and not just one party.”

Robert H. Michel of Illinois, the minority leader whom Mr. Foley allowed to preside at the closing of the 103rd Congress, said Mr. Foley had attained that bipartisan goal himself. Mr. Foley, he said, “just felt it was a significant step from being majority leader” and that as speaker, “you submerge” partisan impulses.

But his good relations with Mr. Michel did not stop Republicans from taking aim at Mr. Foley, whose rural district in and around Spokane leaned Republican.

George Nethercutt, a lawyer backed not only by the national Republican apparatus but also by the National Rifle Association and supporters of term limits, ran against Mr. Foley in 1994, saying he had lost touch with the district. Mr. Nethercutt promised to serve only three terms (though he changed his mind and served five) and won narrowly. Mr. Gingrich later called Washington State “ground zero” of the Republican onslaught that year.

The Nethercutt victory brought an end to a 30-year House career that was a textbook example of a traditional rise to power.

Thomas Stephen Foley was born on March 6, 1929, in Spokane, the only son of Ralph E. Foley, a county prosecutor and judge, and the former Helen Marie Higgins, a teacher whose family had been pioneers in Lincoln County, Wash.

He attended Gonzaga Preparatory School and Gonzaga University in Spokane before transferring to the University of Washington, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a law degree in 1957. Afterward, he joined the Spokane County prosecutor’s office, taught constitutional law at Gonzaga’s law school and worked in the office of the Washington State attorney general.

In 1960, he joined the staff of Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington as chief counsel and worked with him on the staff of the Senate Committee on the Interior. Senator Jackson, who was known as Scoop, was a mentor: Mr. Foley had known him since he was young, when Mr. Jackson would come for dinner at his parents’ house.

It was Senator Jackson who urged Mr. Foley to run against an 11-term Republican incumbent, Walt Horan, in 1964. He won in what was a great year for Democrats, who captured both houses of Congress as President Lyndon B. Johnson earned a full term in a landslide.

In 1968, Mr. Foley married Heather Strachan, a lawyer who became an unofficial chief of staff for her husband. In 1992, The New York Times wrote of her, “In contrast to her husband, a gentle, friendly man whose success was built on his congeniality, Mrs. Foley is blunt-spoken and strong-minded and has become increasingly resented and feared as her power has grown.”

Besides his wife, Mr. Foley is survived by a sister, Maureen Latimer.

Vacancies enabled Mr. Foley to rise quickly on the Agriculture Committee, a post of importance to his grain-growing constituents in eastern Washington. He was also an important figure in the reform movement in the House, leading the Democratic Study Group in 1974. Its key achievement was a rule enabling the Democratic caucus to elect committee chairmen.

Mr. Foley nominated the incumbent chairman of the Agriculture Committee, W. R. Poage of Texas, to continue in that post. But the caucus, spurred by 75 change-oriented freshmen elected in the wake of Watergate, rejected him and elected Mr. Foley instead. Two years later, he was elected chairman of the Democratic Caucus.

He gave up both posts in 1981 when Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill and the majority leader, Mr. Wright, asked him to serve as Democratic whip, a rung on the leadership ladder that Mr. O’Neill had climbed. Another reason he took the job was that it offered him a chance to involve himself in broader issues, especially foreign policy.

After Mr. O’Neill retired and Mr. Wright became speaker in 1987, Mr. Foley advanced to majority leader, and to speaker on Mr. Wright’s resignation.

After leaving Congress, Mr. Foley was chairman of President Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1995 to 1997. He then served for three years as ambassador to Japan, a nation he had studied and frequently visited, in part to promote his district’s farm products.

Rather than retire, Mr. Foley remained in Washington, where he and his wife had built a house, and practiced law there at the blue chip firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. He and Jeffrey R. Biggs, his former press secretary, collaborated on a biographical book published in 1999, titling it “Honor in the House.” "

Washington Post

"Mr. Foley was one of Capitol Hill’s most outspoken critics of the extreme partisanship that emerged toward the end of his career, which contributed to his defeat in the 1994 election and has since intensified so dramatically that Congress is often described as “broken.” He was elected to the House in 1964 and served for 30 of the 40 consecutive years that his party controlled the chamber. Mr. Foley established himself from the outset as a conciliatory figure; one of his first acts after his election victory was to host a reception for the Republican incumbent he defeated to win the seat. As he rose through the leadership ranks — from majority whip to majority leader and finally to speaker in 1989 — he became known as a consensus builder. He helped forge a compromise that allowed the deficit-reducing Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation to go through in the mid-1980s. He publicly supported President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, on his controversial economic strategy. During President Bill Clinton’s administration, Mr. Foley helped him win passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement despite opposition from many other Democrats. He was a burly man with a commanding physical presence, but especially as speaker he did not seem to relish power. “There is a degree to which you can sort of push, encourage, support, direct,” he once told the New York Times. “But the Speakership isn’t a dictatorship.” That outlook separated him from Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., the powerful, back-slapping Massachusetts liberal who presided over the House in the late 1970s and through most of the 1980s, and from Jim Wright, the Texas Democrat who succeeded O’Neill and was criticized for heavy-handedness. By the later years of the Democratic majority, the party was increasingly perceived to have grown arrogant with power. Then Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the future speaker of the GOP-controlled House, seized on the resentment to launch what became known as the Republican revolution. One of his chief tools of political warfare — later wielded against him — was the ethics inquiry. His most prominent target was Wright, who resigned from Congress in 1989 amid a polarizing investigation into his book sales and personal business dealings.Mr. Foley, then majority leader, succeeded Wright as speaker. For two more election cycles the Democrats held the House, but Republican momentum, fueled by Gingrich, was building. In the 1994 election, Mr. Foley was painted as a Washington insider — the figure­head of the unpopular Democratic House — and buffeted by calls to “De-Foley-ate Congress.” When he lost, he was thefirst House speaker to be unseated since Abraham Lincoln was president. Major role in spite of himself A grandson of homesteaders and son of a judge, Mr. Foley sometimes seemed out of place in the rough-and-tumble of Capitol Hill politics, even as he ascended to become, as House speaker, second in line of succession to the presidency. The New Yorker magazine once described him as a “major player almost in spite of himself.”

He won his House seat by defeating an 11-term Republican, Walt Horan, in a conservative district in eastern Washington state. Mr. Foley had not registered his candidacy until minutes before the filing deadline because he was not entirely convinced that he wanted to run. In the nation’s capital, he joined other Democrats in leading the series of historic reforms that reordered the House by dismantling its seniority-based system and decentralizing power among the subcommittees and individual members.Mr. Foley stood to benefit from those reforms in 1975, when colleagues moved to replace entrenched chairmen including W.R. Poage (D-Tex.) of the Agriculture Committee. Mr. Foley, then the committee’s second-ranking Democrat, refused to partake in Poage’s ouster and instead rose to his defense. When Mr. Foley was elected chairman, he named Poage vice chairman.“It was an extraordinary moment in House history,” former congressman Don Bonker (D-Wash.) told The Washington Post years later, remarking on the collegiality Mr. Foley had displayed.After the 1980 election, Mr. Foley gave up the committee chairmanship to become majority whip. He drew wide attention in 1982, when he gave a televised speech calling on Democratic colleagues to cast a vote of “political courage” to support Reagan’s tax proposal.“A star is born,” O’Neill, a political kingmaker as speaker, was quoted as saying shortly there­after in admiration of Mr. Foley’s performance. As majority leader, a post he assumed after the 1986 election, Mr. Foley became part of the troika that included Wright and Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), the party whip. Mr. Foley stood out as decidedly the least partisan of the three.Some prominent Democrats expressed frustration with what they considered Mr. Foley’s excessive caution at a time when Republicans, led by Gingrich, appeared to be on the march. O’Neill was widely reported to have said that Mr. Foley could “argue three sides of every issue.” “When you talk to Tom, you start biting your fingernails and you don’t stop until you’re up to your elbows,” former congressman Dan Rostenkowski, the powerful Illinois Democrat, once told Time magazine. “What he does is good, but sometimes getting there is frustrating.”Characteristically, Mr. Foley acknowledged his critics’ points. But, he once told the New York Times, “I guess I don’t think caution is a bad attribute.”“I do look at problems from as many sides as possible,” he said. “I concede that. I say, ‘What about this? What about this?’ That’s how I decide what the best course should be.”His speakershipMr. Foley’s speakership began with what was roundly described as an episode of unscrupulous partisanship. At the time of his selection, the Republican National Committee released a memo titled “Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet.” In what was described as an effort to cast doubt on Mr. Foley’s reputation as a moderate, the memo compared his voting record to that of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a liberal legislator who was openly gay.Legislators on both sides of the aisle condemned the memo and its innuendo. Mr. Foley appeared on television and said that he was “of course, not a homosexual, been married for 21 years.”Lee Atwater, the RNC chairman, apologized to him. President George H.W. Bush called the memo “disgusting.”

Despite the on going infighting, the House achieved a number of legislative milestones during Mr. Foley’s speakership, which spanned five and a half years, from the early months of the George H.W. Bush administration through the first half of Clinton’s first term.During the Bush years, Mr. Foley presided over the House during the passage of a landmark update to the Clean Air Act, expansions of the Head Start and Medicaid programs, the Americans With Disabilities Act and, most notably, the massive 1990 budget deal that established “pay-as-you-go” practices. That legislation forced Bush to break his “no new taxes” promise — a key issue in his 1992 reelection defeat — and split the Republican Party, with Gingrich leading the opposition.During the Clinton administration, Congress passed a second massive budget deal that laid the groundwork for balancing the budget but stirred controversy because of the tax increases it imposed. Other legislative milestones, besides NAFTA, included passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.But the “primary significance” of his speakership, said Thomas E. Mann, the congressional scholar, was Mr. Foley’s leadership at a time of such turbulence in the House.“It was a time when the House was unraveling,” he said, “and so it was a very difficult period, especially for someone like Foley who had . . . such respect for the institution and reverence for it.”Mr. Foley’s Republican challenger in the 1994 election, George R. Nethercutt, benefited from Mr. Foley’s association with the deeply unpopular Congress. Contributing to voter dissatisfaction was the House banking scandal, in which it was discovered that members had been permitted to overdraw their accounts in the House bank. Mr. Foley was accused of responding ineffectively to the issue.His district became a microcosm of all the turmoil and rancor in American politics — including, prominently, the widespread and heated debate over whether House members should be bound by term limits. In his campaign, Nethercutt highlighted Mr. Foley’s lawsuit challenging a ballot initiative setting such limits. “I would never sue my constituents to save my job,” Nethercutt said in one campaign commercial. He won by about 4,000 votes.Mr. Foley told reporters at the end of his speakership that, if he had any regret, it was that he had not conveyed “as effectively as I hoped we might, the work we do and some of the achievements that we have made and accomplished in this Congress.”Nicknamed ‘the senator’ Thomas Stephen Foley was born March 6, 1929, in Spokane, Wash. While attending a Jesuit preparatory school, he was nicknamed “the senator” for his intellectual, methodical demeanor. The New York Times once reported that he defeated a lisp to become a top debater. He received a bachelor of arts degree in 1951 and a law degree in 1957, both from the University of Washington.Mr. Foley practiced law in Spokane before becoming a prosecutor and, later, assistant state attorney general. He became involved in politics through Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), who in 1961 hired him as a special counsel on the Interior and Insular Affairs committee and later encouraged him to pursue elective office.While working for Jackson, Mr. Foley met Heather Strachan. They were married in 1968, by which time Mr. Foley had been elected to Congress. For years she worked as his unpaid administrative assistant and at times drew attention for the power she wielded on Capitol Hill. In one oft-recited episode, she dared to ask then-Speaker O’Neill during a meeting to put out his cigar. (He did.)

Besides his wife, survivors include a sister.In his early years on Capitol Hill, Mr. Foley opposed the escalation of the Vietnam War and supported the Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who won a landslide victory the same year Mr. Foley joined the House. Mr. Foley said in 1989 that, of his legislative achievements, he was most proud of his work on the Agriculture Committee to advance the food stamp program. He was credited with forging a partnership between advocates for farmers, who tended to be conservative, and advocates for increased social programs.In 1997, Clinton selected Mr. Foley as U.S. ambassador to Japan, a post he held until 2001. In recent years, he lived largely out of the public spotlight in his home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, not far from the chamber that he had led through one of the most tumultuous periods in its history.He once reflected poignantly, and presciently, on the nature of political life.“Sometimes I think it looks like it’d be fun to be committed in that sort of unreserved way to something — to have a life work about which there are no doubts,” he told the New York Times in 1990. “I sometimes envy people in the House who are engaged in stopping something. Most of my Congressional career, I’ve had to try to put together coalitions of support or worry about moving legislative efforts. . . . It’s a lot easier to blow up the bridges and to block the crossings.”

Is it to work in the best interests of themselves (their career) in adhering & even extrapolating party ideology?

Is it to work in the best interests of me as a constituent?

Unfortunately all these three points conflict.

However, taking the first point, surely to work in the best interests of the country they must look at the utilitarian approach – or to quote John Stuart Mill:

“In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.”

The problem is that the monetarist approach of Milton Friedman and the macro-economic approach of J.M. Keynes can both lay claim to propound “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”.

Taking the second point, why does one enter politics? It is undoubtedly to serve altruistically – for Constituent and Queen (or President) and Country. However, it is inevitable that, to quote Lord Acton “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men”.

And taking the third point, my views are expressed in the manifesto of the Party I choose to vote for. Even if my representative was of my political persuasion, I expect them to stand by those who voted for them.

Finally – how dare any politician hold a country to ransom. How dare they choose to damage their country and send it backwards – a short term view.

This is echoed in Lord Tebbit’s retrospective comments on the 1984-1985 Miners Strike:

Those mining communities had good working class values and a sense of family values. The men did real men's heavy work going down the pit. There were also some very close-knit communities which were able to deal with the few troublesome kids. If they had any problems they would take the kid round the back and give them a good clip round the ear and that would be the end of that. Many of these communities were completely devastated, with people out of work turning to drugs and no real man's work because all the jobs had gone. There is no doubt that this led to a breakdown in these communities with families breaking up and youths going out of control. The scale of the closures went too far. The damage done to those communities was enormous as a result of the strike.

As to violence, Matthew Simmons stated:

It would be naïve, in my opinion, to assume the gap between rich and poor could stay as it is now, and even more naïve to assume this gap can grow without finally creating massive civic turmoil. If the gap gets too great, the poor will finally come over the walls of prosperity and attempt to redistribute this wealth. History has shown this to be the case, time after time. Most of our worst wars were not ideological battles but true fights over the redistribution of wealth‖.

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.

This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.

For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crises aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our wellbeing.

For at the end of the day, prosperity goes beyond material pleasures. It transcends material concerns.

It resides in the quality of our lives and in the health and happiness of our families. It is present in the strength of our relationships and our trust in the community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose.

It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the life of society.

Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. It is the most urgent task of our times.

To me – this speaks volumes as to a politician’s responsibilities. Unless they step up to these responsibilities they do not deserve to represent anyone. As I’ve always said, politicians are the last people we want to represent us.

Thursday, 17 October 2013

The crisis is averted ...for the moment, but it's been a disastrous time for the USA - and Congress has had its reputation shredded. How did it come to this?

There are many reasons why Congress has got itself into such a mess. Bipartisanship has become rare - the parties getting further apart; civility has flown out of the window and a new "macho" politics has taken hold. The same 'win at all costs', aggressive attitude which brought the banking industry to ruin has infected politics. Who would have imagined that so many members of Congress would be prepared to allow the US to default on its debts?

Even at the 11th hour and 59th minute - 18 Senators and 144 Members of Congress (that's 30% of its membership) voted against the last deal to avoid a default!

I listened to Senator's Cruz's speech in the debate (thanks to the miracles that are C-SPAN and wifi-enabled iPads) - it was full of slogans and a complete blindness to the impact that his advocacy, if successful, would have on the rest of the world - let alone ordinary Americans.

Newt Gingrich has always been of interest to me - he's had a big impact on the Republican Party and Congress. He has a good understanding of how powerful the use of language can be - and was adept at using congressional procedures to advance his ends. But he was a bomb thrower. His tactics poisoned Congress. His successors are worse - what we saw in recent days and weeks was a host of political suicide bombers - prepared to destroy everything - and hurt lots of people - in order to advance their ideology.

Legislatures need to be about "deliberation" and negotiation. Different views and interests have to be accommodated with 'give and take'. The alternative is violence. It's time to call a halt on the destructive politics which has paralysed a great institution and a great country. Some older people will remember the Republican leaders of old - they fought their corner, certainly - but did so with respect for other people and theirm points of view. They are sorely missed.

Tuesday, 15 October 2013

-- SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TEXAS), the architect of the government shutdown, was spotted Monday night at Tortilla Coast, huddling with 15 to 20 House conservatives devising a strategy on how to respond to a Senate deal, Roll Call's Matt Fuller reports. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, also dining in the restaurant, appeared interested in what the group was discussing. http://bit.ly/15DdPZ3

Tortilla Coast is my favourite eating place on the Hill. (see my post from October 2009); I tasted my first margarita there - and it is where I celebrated my 50th birthday with a meal.

It is very close to the House Offices on Capitol Hill - to get there one passes the capitol South metro station - and it's on the right hand corner of the road.

I'm not very keen on receiving messages from Senator Cruz and his buddies at the moment (they've taken the US & the world to a very dangerous place for the sake of their ideology) - but I would accept a "wish you were here" message from them.

Monday, 14 October 2013

The exams for the Open University's W200 and W201 Law courses are now over. There will therefore be no more exam revision posts for a while! But Washminster will continue to follow matters relevant to law students.

I've had a very busy few days, which is the reason for the lack of posts, but now am back. During a long weekend I was based in Greenwich - and did a lot of research into Westminster and other history. The picture above was taken from a boat on the Thames - I took a 'mini-cruise' to widen my knowledge of England's most important river. The fruits of that will be appearing over the next few days.

I've also resurrected a local blog - http://westofwatlingstreet.wordpress.com/. It's aimed at Milton Keynes residents living, believe it or not, west of Watling Street - the Roman Road which runs through Milton Keynes (on its way from the channel ports of Dover and Richborough to Wroxeter and Chester). Of course it's not exclusive - if you'd like to follow events; issues and most of all - history - in England's New City - then please do take a look and subscribe.

Saturday, 5 October 2013

Yesterday I wrote about the skill of asking questions. Today I have a couple of comments about avoiding giving the answer called for.

It is part of a politician's skills to be able to deflect questions he doesn't want to answer. You will see it at Question Time in the House of Commons. It can also be seen outside the chamber when the media are seeking to get answers. I know that prospective politicians are given training (as are Press spokespersons for companies and charities) into steering an answer to ensure that the person being questioned gets THEIR point across.

But does it work?

In the short term perhaps. But in the long term such evasiveness does not go down well with voters. Similarly in exams - it will do you no good at all to write about what you want to say, when the examiner is seeking to test a particular area of subject knowledge that you don't want to discuss. Deliberate evasiveness may look clever - but it won't earn marks. Similarly walking into an exam room and telling the examiner what you've learnt, rather than answering the question set - and this can be the result of misreading a question, as much as evasion - won't be rewarded.

Friday, 4 October 2013

There's a wonderful line (well let's be honest about it, there are a host of superb lines) in "Yes Minister" - one of my favourites is a comment from a civil servant -

"Ministers are ignorant not because we do not give them the right answers but because they do not ask us the right questions."

Asking the right question is key to getting answers. Watching Select Committees at Westminster or Congressional Committees in Washington provide many examples of questioning - as does observing lawyers cross-examining in Court. It is well worth watching questioners and reflecting on their questions - which can easily be dodged? - and which get to the heart of the matter?

Thursday, 3 October 2013

All three major party conferences have been completed - and Parliament returns next week.

For details of what is on - go to http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/ & click on , selecting either the day or week you want to look at, and by clicking on the tabs which House, & which area of House work you want to look at.

Wednesday, 2 October 2013

Much (welcome) emphasis is given in the press to the activities of the committees in the House of Commons. There are "Public Bill Committees", which go through and amend bills as part of the legislative process. The Public Accounts Committee has a special role in overseeing the use of public money, and there is a system of Departmental Select Committees.

Committees in the House of Lords are often overlooked - but are great significance. The European Committees have an important role in the scrutiny of EU policy and legislation. The Lords is very good at overseeing secondary legislation from the British Government.

The House of Lords Library has recently produced a research note on current and former committees. It is available here. In my view it is both an interesting read and a useful work of reference.

Tuesday, 1 October 2013

I should have slept last night, instead (albeit with my eyes closed), I listened to the radio feed of C-SPAN on my iPad. The speeches in the Senate and the House of Representatives were broadcast as the clocks moved towards midnight in Washington. Then at 5am, I heard Louise Slaughter state that the time had come - and the government was now shutting down. After months of argument - the new financial year had begun, and Congress had failed to provide money for it. Congress has proved that it has become a non-functioning body.

How has it come to this?

The roots go back many years. I am not a believer in a mythical "Golden Age" - when politicians were impeccably civil towards each other; when decisions were reached by consensus, without the intrusion of party politics. Politics has always been hard fought. Even the most well mannered gentlemen knew how to push and shove, and play hardball when necessary. Reading Congressional and Parliamentary history is a great antidote to the rose-tinted view of earlier days.

But something has gone badly wrong. We are getting used to seeing political "suicide-bombing". A small group of dedicated ideologues holding a country hostage - and threatening to - (and last night in Congress, actually) - inflicting harm on fellow citizens. There are public servants who will not get paid. They will cut back on their spending threatening others' livelihoods. Holiday makers (sorry Sis, your trip to New York to visit the Statute of Liberty today will be thwarted - as will be your planned visits to the Gettysburg Battlefield Visitor Center and the historic buildings of Philadelphia on the rest of your holiday) - will be disappointed - and foreign visitors like my Sister won't be transferring money earned in Britain into the US economy.

In the UK we have the Eurosceptic fanatics - I don't mean those who have their concerns about the direction and policies of the EU (I respect that and will happily engage in dialogue with them) - I mean the fanatics who are prepared to invent any story to discredit Europe; who are determined to have Britain out "of Europe", whatever the cost in jobs and British influence.

How has this suicidal tendency got itself into our legislatures? I think its worth remembering the words of President Kennedy at his inauguration -

"So let us begin anew—remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us."

It has been forgotten. "No surrender" is the battle cry of the Congressional warriors - but let's remember that that slogan lay behind, and continued for years, the conflict in Northern Ireland. Politicians have got elected on a promise to "take on Washington"; they've portrayed deliberation and negotiation as weakness or selling out. Cross-party working has been shunned.

Partisanship has increased. There are many academic explanations of it - and I would thoroughly recommend Sean Theriault's excellent "Party Polarization in Congress". We need to go beyond this - we need to start working on making politics function properly again.

That doesn't mean cozy stitch-ups; or an unrealistic denial of the very real differences in opinions about how to solve our common problems - it does mean a greater emphasis on deliberation; on honourable negotiation - a rejection of the view that 'compromise' is weak.

It means that politicians should stop listening to un-elected gurus who urge slash and burn tactics - Malcolm Tucker is a fictional character - Lynton Crosby; Damian McBride; Dick Morris; and their ilk are not. Voters should tell the parties that they will punish them if their behaviour continues to deteriorate.

About Me

An experienced lecturer, tutor & researcher with practical experience of working in the UK and European Parliaments.
I have a keen academic and practical interest in the workings of both the UK Parliament and the US Congress.
Over the years I have broadcast on both UK & US Politics for BBC local radio stations.